Since I’m here I may as well experiment

Continuing from my visit to the park yesterday to photograph the autumn season. My disappointment with the color array left me to do more experimentation than I normally would. One thing I wanted to practice was in camera multiple exposures to create an impressionist look. I’ve seen this effect done with film cameras that have the ability to take endless multiple exposures but most digital cameras don’t allow multiple exposures at all.

The Pentax K-30 camera I was using allows me to take up to 9 exposures on one file with the option of automatic EV adjustment which saves a lot of calculating beforehand that, I imagine, would be mind numbing if shooting on film. I used all 9 exposures for this image with slight movements of the camera for each exposure. It looks OK but in reality I needed to take 3 times or more exposures to pull off the impressionist look correctly. I guess I could have done the same thing on a few more image files and then blended them together in Photoshop – heck, I could have done it ALL in Photoshop with just one exposure but that would be a lot of mouse clicks and zero fun. I’ll still practice the technique some more, perhaps on a less busy subject. Getting the movements correct is the hard part – too much and it looks like a bunch of photos on top of each other, too little and it just looks like a blurry photo.